Cooper Fireworks

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-5560-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 181 Seiten

Jeff Cooper has been called the father of modern pistolcraft by gun pundits and quite a few more colorful monikers by those who have wound up on the business end of his pistol. Cooper's name has come to mean shooting, wisdom, and combat. Cooper's Fireworks is a collection of wild, hilarious, shocking, and always meaningful tales from the remarkable life of an American firearms legend. History, travel, adventure at its most gripping, firearms and shooting advice, war stories, and much more are included in this fascinating and thoughtful book, written by the man who founded Gunsite, the world's foremost firearms training center. Mount up and ride along with Cooper as he fights the Japanese in the Pacific as a U.S. Marine, hunts giant Cape buffalo in Africa, recounts the exploits of fighting men such as Wild Bill Hickok and U.S. Marine Medal of Honor winner Col. Herman Henry Hanneken, and much more. J

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cooper, Jeff

Leseproben

1 The Deadly American IT IS NOT UNUSUAL for critics of the American scene to deplore what they hold to be an uncivilized toleration of personal violence in our society. Violent crime is not so much the issue, but rather the use of violence by socially acceptable persons in self-defense, in the righting of wrongs, and in meeting challenging situations. Such critics feel that Americans are too ready to ignore the police and handle their emergencies personally; and that, further, this barbarous attitude is encouraged, rather than inhibited, by our tradition. It is possible that such criticism is well founded. The frontier experience of the Anglo-American, while similar in many ways to that of other colonial peoples, was not identical with it. And with the independence of the United States its people split away in various significant attitudes even from their heretofore similarly disposed Canadian cousins to the north. The westward movement of the United States, as placed in time between the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of Wounded Knee, seems to have developed a notably violent breed of men, probably more prone to homicide than any other generalized group in modern times. This period is only shortly passed, and its memory is still quite fresh in our society. This memory may indeed lead Americans, more than other twentieth century people, to feel that to be a man-killer is not necessarily to be a monster. While a strongly scriptural culture might ponder the Sixth Commandment at length, it would be equally familiar with the exploits of Joshua, Samson, David and a score of other Old Testament figures who seem to have interpreted the tablet’s injunction as, “Thou shalt not kill, unless thou hast a very good reason.” It may be impossible to prove, by a soundly documented statistical survey, that the nineteenth century western American was a more “prickly” man—that is, readier to kill for what he regarded as a good reason—than his frontier counterpart in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Latin America, or Siberia. There is some evidence that this is so, but it is not the sort of thing that is likely to be recorded. The westerner certainly had a reputation for it among foreign commentators, but whether this was founded upon fact or fancy is at least open to discussion. Apart from statistics, however, there may be another way to investigate this idea. Whether or not the westerner was a more light-hearted killer than other people, if we think he was, the ethical residue is the same. If modern Americans are more bloody-minded than other people because of a tradition of violence, the factual basis of the tradition is of only incidental importance. This is nowhere better expressed than in Winston Churchill’s sonorous comment on the Arthurian legend: “It is all true, or it ought to be, and more and better besides!” It is the intent of this essay, therefore, to inquire into the concept of the killer in western legendry, and so to discover if our tradition does indeed sanction homicide to a greater extent than our critics can approve. Man-killing seems to be the natural condition of man. A large body of anthropological opinion holds that it was the predatory, carnivorous hominid who took the upward path in evolution, rather than his herbivorous brother, who developed eventually into the great apes of today. Be that as it may, men have been killing men, with only brief interruptions, since they have been identifiable as men. Thus some problem exists even in separating the Cains from the Abels. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I shall set forth a concept of the homicidal man—the killer—as he appears as a folk hero, not just as a man who happened to kill another man. To begin, we may discard those hero characterizations which a “killer,” in our sense, is not. The killer is not a criminal. There are certainly Robin Hoods in American legendry, and many of them boasted a long list of victims, but such outlaws, while often eulogized as “good boys gone wrong,” are more deplored than deified. The Jesse James, the Billy Bonney, the Joaquin Murrieta have their apologists, but that is just what they are—apologists. They feel the need to justify what is generally held to be a wicked career. And the others—the unjustifiable criminal killers—the Harpes, the Murrells, the Girtys, and the Dillingers—are, for the most part, excoriated. In some cases it is hard to tell where a folk hero stands in relation to the law, but in these cases outlawry is an irrelevant issue and the man is a hero quite apart from any concept of social order. The killer is not an “Indian-fighter.” To the Anglo-American, the American Indian was only exceptionally a human antagonist, and thus did not really count. Partly because of the vast cultural gulf separating the Renaissance European from the Stone Age; partly because of a fanatic Protestant Christianity which generally held even a Catholic, let alone a heathen, to be beyond salvation; partly because of the really hideous savagery displayed upon occasion by the Indians; and partly because of a sense of guilt about the obvious injustice of the colonists’ forcible subjugation of the native people, the Indian was simply vermin. Killing Indians was not the same thing as killing equals. Thus a famous Indian-fighter might have many human lives to account for, and might be highly thought of as a sort of sanitary engineer, but he was not a killer in the semantics of the time. The killer is not a soldier. Soldiers normally kill in battle—sometimes with enthusiasm and sometimes with the utmost repugnance. But killing in war is a social duty and not a matter of volition. It is reasonably common for a man who is a veritable tiger in battle not even to own personal weapons when he returns to civil status. Such a man may have killed a hundred times but he is not a killer. Wade Hampton of Carolina, the Confederacy’s most prominent “citizen-soldier,” felt that, in the course of four years’ service in grades from colonel to lieutenant general, he had killed two men with his sword and nine with his pistols, but he was not a prickly man. Nathan Forrest, on the other hand, was; but he was so both before and after his military service. Heroic and sanguinary service in war has always been honored by civilized man. Such honor cannot be considered peculiar to any particular social experience, and is certainly not a unique feature of the western tradition. The killer is not a policeman. The duly appointed enforcers of the law are normally armed with lethal weapons in modern society—Great Britain being the conspicuous exception—and it is assumed that they will kill, if they must, in self-defense or to prevent the escape of a person who has committed an atrocious felony. Such men be killers, but, if so, it is not a part of their job. John Slaughter and Bill Hickok were; Wyatt Earp probably was; Billy Breakenridge definitely was not. Yet all were lawmen, and all killed many men. (It is curious to note that a feature of Ian Fleming’s celebrated adventure tales is the idea that certain secret agents in the British service, designated by a double zero preceding their serial numbers, are “authorized to kill” in the performance of their duties. This suggests a significant difference in modern British and American attitudes, since it seems evident that any man who is officially armed must be so authorized.) What the killer is, by the definition I wish to use, is a man who simply does not hold the lives of his adversaries to be particularly important, who is highly skilled with his weapons and enthusiastic about their use, who does not prey upon society and usually obeys its laws, but whom it is very dangerous to thwart. Such a man can and has become a hero in American legend. In that he serves himself first and a cause only as convenient, he is unusual, outside of the United States, in modern times. Historically, his counterparts are the Mycenaean hero, the feudal knight, and the Samurai. He is interesting to Americans in that he exists in our immediate past, not “long ago and far away.” Our grandfathers knew him personally—he was the grandfather of some of us. His spirit lies light, and responds to the faintest of invocations. If we are indeed a bit too dangerous for “the century of the common man,” his example may well be the reason. Discounting the creations of pure fiction, America has a host of folk heroes. These men, like Herakles, actually lived, but, as with him, it is not always easy to separate what they did from what they are thought to have done. It is the duty of the scholar to try, of course, but such work does not affect tradition. Alexander probably did not cut the Gordian Knot, but tradition says he did. The act is true to his character, as society remembers it, and Alexander’s reputed character unquestionably affected more men, over a longer period, than his actual deeds. Therefore, in discussing the character of American folk heroes, the stories told about them must be given a certain weight, even if they are difficult or impossible to verify. The image, in this case, may be as significant as the reality. Most American folk heroes killed men. A minority were killers in the rather narrow sense of this paper. However, the killer-hero does exist. For a conspicuous early example one may consider the case of James Bowie, of Louisiana and Texas. Bowie led such a wildly romantic life that if he were invented he...